How to configure Spring MVC with pure Java-based configuration?

You need to make following changes to web.xml in order to support java based configuration. This will tell the the DispatcherServlet to load configuration using the annotation based java configuration AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext. You only need to pass the location of your java config file to the contextConfigLocation param, as below

<servlet>
  <servlet-name>springDispatcherServlet</servlet-name>
  <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
  <init-param>
    <param-name>contextClass</param-name>
    <param-value>org.springframework.web.context.support.AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext</param-value>
   </init-param>
   <init-param>
    <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
    <param-value>/*path to your WebSpringConfig*/ </param-value>
  </init-param>
  <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>

Update: Doing the same without making changes to web.xml

You can even do this without web.xml as Servlet Specification 3.0 makes the web.xml optional. You only need to implement/configure WebApplicationInitializer interface to configure the ServletContext which will allow you to create, configure, and perform registration of DispatcherServlet programmatically. The good thing is that WebApplicationInitializer is detected automatically.

In summary, one needs to implement WebApplicationInitializer to get rid of web.xml.

 public class MyWebAppInitializer implements WebApplicationInitializer {

 @Override
 public void onStartup(ServletContext container) {
  // Create the 'root' Spring application context
  AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext rootContext =
                       new AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext();
  rootContext.register(WebSpringConfig.class);

  // Manage the lifecycle of the root application context
  container.addListener(new ContextLoaderListener(rootContext));

  // Create the dispatcher servlet's Spring application context
  AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext dispatcherContext =
                     new AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext();
  dispatcherContext.register(DispatcherConfig.class);

  // Register and map the dispatcher servlet
  ServletRegistration.Dynamic dispatcher =
    container.addServlet("dispatcher", new DispatcherServlet(dispatcherContext));
    dispatcher.setLoadOnStartup(1);
    dispatcher.addMapping("https://stackoverflow.com/");
  }
}

Update: from comments
A slightly more convoluted explanation is also included in the official Spring reference Spring 4 Release

Reference:

http://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/3.1.x/javadoc-api/org/springframework/web/WebApplicationInitializer.html